"Indeed, pappa," replied Olivia, "… I have read a great deal of controversy. I have read the disputes between Thwackum and Square; the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday the savage, and I am now employed in reading the controversy in Religious courtship."

The Vicar of Wakefield'

Olivia reads books, and the Vicar, seemingly satisfied with his daughter's intellectual qualifications in this instance, sends her off to help his wife concoct a "gooseberry-pye" (45), an act perhaps a bit more culinary than Charlotte's cutting bread and butter, but just as ironically amusing if one takes the position of early nineteenth-century English wags. Goethe read books too, perhaps even the same books as Olivia. The one book, however, that probably exerted the greatest influence over his own novelistic art was one Olivia could not have read because she was part and parcel of its fiction: The Vicar of Wakefield.

The nature of this influence is revealed in an experience of his youth he relates in the last third of the tenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetic Fiction and Truth).² There he examines an escapade orchestrated by a certain Weyland that validates the title of his autobiography as does no other: a disguised visit to the country vicar Brion's family in Sesenheim in which, with minor variation, the members become identified with the family characters of Goldsmith's ironic tale. The older daughter becomes Olivia. The younger daughter, Goethe's beloved Friedricke, becomes Sophia (a name well-worn in Tom Jones and in the German form "Sophie" also Charlotte's younger sister in Werther—one indication among many that Goethe never wanted to identify totally with his novel's main character). The son becomes Moses; Weyland, by his own design, a better-behaved Mr. Thornhill; and Goethe himself, as if for those of us interested in which character in the Vicar of Wakefield he realized was the author-narrator, Mr. Burchell. Primrose's son George in Goldsmith's novel shares his name with the son of an innkeeper, whose clothes Goethe-Burchell slips on to examine Weyland's merry prank. Thus living out Goldsmith's artful irony, disguised and fully reflecting on the events themselves, Goethe became other than what he was. Thus too did he experience life as what even Aristotle might have eventually construed as the supreme irony: a real fiction.

Wherein, however, lies the quick of this experience? Goethe answers in a way present critics might wish to ponder:

Schreiben ist ein Missbrauch der Sprache, stille fair sich lesen ein trauriges Surrogat der Rede. Writing is a misuse of speech; to read for oneself in silence, a dismal surrogate for conversation.

(WA Dichtung und Wahrheit 10 1.27.373)

In Sesenheim, he marvels at his "Sophia's" way with words. More specifically, he marvels at her voice:

Es war mir sehr angenehm, stillschweigend der Schilderung zuzuhoren, die sie von der kleinen Welt machte, in der sie sich bewegte, und von denen Menschen, die sie besonders schatzte. Sie brachte mir dadurch einen klaren und zugleich so liebenswurdigen Begriff von ihrem Zustande bei, der sehr wunderlich auf mich wirkte.… Sie wurde zuletzt immer redseliger und ich immer stiller. Es horte sich ihr gar so gut zu, und da ich nur ihre Stimme vernahm … so war es mir, als ob ich in ihr Herz sahe.…

(It was very pleasant for me to hear in silence the descriptive representation she made of the small world in which she moved and of those people she especially treasured. She imparted to me thereby a clear and simultaneously very amiable notion of her condition that worked in me in a exceedingly wondrous way.… She became in the end evermore talkative; 1, always more silent. She was a delight to listen to, and since I heard her voice … thus it appeared to me as if I saw into her heart.…

(WA D & W10 1. 27.355-56, emphasis mine)³

To stress even more strongly the centrality of the narrating voice as character in his fictive-made-real-made-narrative prank on the German vicar's family, Goethe tells us that he told aloud in his own voice "The New Melusina," a tale he later introduced into Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, and the name character of which he slips into Werther (AV 6a/b).⁴ He does not, however, insert the tale into the text at hand, not because we could find it by turning to the Wanderjahre, but for fear that he might destroy "the rustic reality and simplicity, which pleasingly surrounds us here" ("den landlichen Wirklichkeit und Einfalt, die uns hier gefallig umgibt") (WA D&W 10 1.27.372, emphasis mine). "Sophia's" voice has recreated a world, just as he recreates worlds in his own tales. In the telling of tales lie the human sympathies, the worlds shared between the author and his audience, between the narrator and his character, and between the characters themselves. These comprise the "uns" to which Goethe refers above: not only the readers of Dichtung und Wahrheit, but also the readers as participants in the fictive, textually-induced reality of Goethe's German vicarage that surrounds them. Goethe's ironic "vicarian disguise," his voice, and that of "Sophia" has drawn us into a world of narrative that, hence, must also be somehow "ironic." Through her and his "descriptive representation," through their voices, we enter into their conditions, see into their hearts, and know what tensions, contradictions, and differences lie about them.

Sesenheim, then, came to signify for Goethe much more than an ironic prank for his own and others' amusement, for from it also sprang the world of Werther's Waldheim, where was lodged the irony of fictive truth. Therein Goethe propelled a voice, incapable of any ironic perception itself, and forced us to look within its character's heart. For those inhabiting the eighteenth-century, ironically perceived world about him, Werther's world is veiled at best, at worst locked. Thus, in the relationships between Werther's voice and especially the voices of his beloved and of the narrator, Goethe develops a hybrid sense of irony in the novel. His irony is not constructed upon Quintilian's simple rhetorical notion of dissimulatio, nor upon Dr. Johnson's simple "mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words." It does, however, involve the relationship of voices in the novel that are in conflict and exist there, at best, in a state of only partially mutual understanding. As the reader of Goethe's Werther understands these voices and their relationships and as that reader becomes aware of the place of the allusions to Goldsmith's Vicar and, for that matter, other extraneous texts, he too will become aware of that irony Goethe understood emitting from those fictively real voices in Sesenheim. He grasped an irony which he later averred, is "hazardous" indeed (WA Farbenlehre II.l.xii).⁵

There are several general resemblances between Goldsmith's Vicar and Goethe's Werther: Primrose's and Werther's pastoral notions of country life; the harsh injustice they suffer at the hands of a corrupt and corrupting society; "the chaotic pressures and confusions within a society that liked to see itself in orderly terms";⁶ and the honored role as father of the family that both Primrose and Charlotte's father, Amtmann S., share. But a specific correspondence that, like Olivia's reading habits, has to do with books, yet like Goethe's experience in Sesenheim deals with voices and worlds, lies between Goldsmith's "A Ballad" (chapter 7) and Goethe's translation of Ossianic song, both voiced, at least in part, by wandering female narrators, separated from the world and suffering the loss of the beloved:

"Turn, gentle hermit of the dale,
   And guide my lonely way,
To where yon taper cheers the vale,
   With hospitable ray.
"For here forlorn and lost I tread,
   With fainting steps and slow;
Where wilds immeasurably spread,
   Seem lengthening as I go."
(Goldsmith, 47)

Goethe and Macpherson eliminate any human presence on the order of the hermit and significantly isolate and internalize the narrating voice of the wandering female lover, disassociating it completely from the world of the other human beings:

"Es ist Nacht!—ich bin allein, verlohren auf dem sturmischen Hugel. Der Wind saust im Gebirge, der Strom heult den Felsen hinab. Keine Hutte schiutzt mich vor dem Regen [,] mich Verlassne auf dem sturmischen Hogel."

(AV 137a/b)

And Macpherson's "translation from the original," printed as a song, perhaps emitted from some Ossianic collective voice, is without Goldsmith's immediately personalizing and "envoicing" quotation marks or those of Goethe introduced in the revised version of Werther (compare AV 136a and b). Macpherson:

It is night; I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. The torrent pours down the rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of the winds.⁷

Goethe's translation from the English raised a sticky narratological issue that would plague him for the rest of his life: the attitude of an author toward his text and the characters therein. Goldsmith's poem is his own. He indicates that such might be the case by introducing it into his novel through the narrating voice of Mr. Burcell, who, in learned disquisition, mouths what we may learn from another source was Goldsmith's own poetic taste.' Primrose, the gullible, naively perverse butt of Goldsmith's authorial stance, does not voice the poem, and chapter 8 of the novel closes with an ironic and characteristically eighteenth-century comment on the relationship of the sexes:

But as men are most capable of distinguishing merit in women, so the ladies often form the truest judgments of us. The two sexes seem placed as spies upon each other, and are furnished with different abilities, adapted for mutual inspection. (52-53)

Goethe's authorial relationship to and treatment of his prose lyric and protagonist are strikingly different. By the very fact that he, as author, has translated a then-famous historical model and subsequently set it into the voice of his first-person narrator, he forces his audience to conclude that Werther and he are one in the explosively central issue at hand: the creation of the song. Goldsmith works to avoid any possible narrational confusion between the author and his protagonist. His poem is much more an integral part of his text because, in maintaining his distance from his primary narrator, he has guaranteed a consistency in his own voice and in those of his characters. No such sensible distance is exemplified in Goethe's translation of Ossian. In fact its force lies in what seems a confusion of the author and his protagonist. The result, one must admit, however, is riveting, for it opens us to Werther's world: after the long insertion of the Ossianic threnody, instead of a statement on the mutually judgmental relationship between men and women or the like, quite the opposite takes place: Goethe's Charlotte bursts into tears, and Werther rushes off forever departed from his beloved, intent on suicide:

Lebe wohl, Lotte! auf ewig lebe wohl!

(Farewell Lotte! Eternally farewell!)
(AV 146a/b)

Goethe has here broken decisively with the eighteenth-century ironic tradition, and the reader can afford to be amused only at the expense of a lack of human understanding. No human being reading Werther can avoid the overwhelming seduction of the protagonist's voice and in that way ignore his world. But is Werther's lyric voice the only voice in the novel as a whole? No, for, although the narrating voice would seem to be internalized totally within the novel's title character, another narrator always stands behind it, one whose world is distinctly separated from Werther's: "der Herausgeber an den Leser" ("the editor to the reader"). Goethe amplified this view considerably in the revision of his original text.

Why did Goldsmith's simpler irony demand no such voice, no such narrational intrusions? Why does Goldsmith never break the illusion of his first-person protagonist-narrator, whereas Goethe aborts it so decisively?

Lilian Furst, in a perceptive reading of Werther, cut to the heart of what must have been Goethe's complexly ironic intention when she characterized Werther as predominantly the man of sensibility and Charlotte as, for the most part, the woman of sense.⁹ Thus, she suggests that in spite of what Werther in his own voice might feel or fantasize about his beloved, the author, in league with Charlotte and, by extension, other voices, endeavors to sketch distinctions the hero does not.

But let us return to Goethe's text. Part I, June 16th: Charlotte has been reading a novel she dislikes and hands it back to one of the ladies in the carriage on the way to the "Klopstock" ball. This novel has been one in a line of at least two unacceptable ones the ladies have supplied for her amusement. We are only told that she cites the others. Werther is astonished by what he takes to be her intelligence in the matter. Charlotte illuminates further her critical point of view:

Wie ich junger war, sagte sie, liebte ich nichts so sehr als Romane. Weiss Gott wie wohl mir's war, wenn ich mich Sonntags so in ein Eckchen setzen, und mit ganzem Herzen an dem Glück und Unstern einer Miss Jenny Theil nehmen konnte.

("When I was younger," she said, "I enjoyed nothing more than novels. God knows how content I was when on Sundays I could settle myself down in a little comer and partake wholeheartedly in the fortune and misfortune of a Miss Jenny.")

(AV 22a/b)

Charlotte describes herself here as a naive, perhaps even gullible reader of a text written on the order of Richardson's Pamela. But that was in the past. Charlotte is not finished with her discourse on the novel.

Claiming that she has no time to read in such a way now, she declares, in a manner both reflective and philosophical, that her favorite author is one in whom she finds her world reflected or taken up again ("in dem ich meine Welt wieder finde"—AV 231/b, emphasis mine), with whom things occur as they do about her ("bei dem es zugeht wie um mich"—AV 23a/b, emphasis mine), and, yet, whose history or story (Geschichte) becomes to her as interesting and heartfelt as her own domestic life, which is no Paradise ("kein Paradies"—AV 23a/b), but on the whole a source of unspeakable happiness. This time Werther cites her example: The Vicar of Wakefield. What does this woman of sense see in Goldsmith's ironic masterpiece? It is never completely revealed in the body of Goethe's text because, faced with the "truth" (Wahrheit) for him in what she says, Werther in an unreflective, epistolary voice intrudes in characteristic consternation: "Ich bemiihte mich meine Bewegungen uiber diese Worte zu verbergen" ("I did everything I could to cover my agitation at these words"—AV 23a/b).

The voice of the editor-narrator, however, is not eclipsed, but returns at this point after two previous incursions into the text: at the inception of the novel when he admonishes that the book and not Werther be our friend (AV 2a/b) and when in a glossing footnote he advises that:

Der Leser wird sich keine Muhe geben die hier genannten Orte zu suchen; man hat sich genothigt gesehen, die im Originale befindlichen wahren Nahmen zu verandem.

(The reader need not waste his time seeking the places named here; one has seen it necessary to alter the existing true names in [Werther's] original text.)

(AV 121/b)

In the present instance, before Lotte's disquisition on the novel and after Werther's enthusiastic abortion of her views, two more glosses in the form of footnotes adorn the text and are identical in both the original and second version: the first, in which the voice of an impersonal third-person narrator ("Man sieht sich genothiget," "One sees that it is necessary"—AV 22a/b) deletes the names of the rejected novels with the ironic, clearly tongue-in-cheek excuse that no author would care about the judgement "of just one girl" ("eines einzelnen Madchens") and "an unstable young person" ("eines jungen, unstaten Menschen") (AV 22a/b); and again impersonally, the second:

Man hat auch hier die Nahmen einiger vaterlandischen Autoren weggelassen. Wer Theil an Lottchens Beyfalle hat, wird es gewiss an seinem Herzen fuihlen, wenn er diese Stelle lesen sollte, und sonst braucht es ja niemand zu wissen.

(One has also omitted here the name of several native authors. He who shares in little Lotte's approval will certainly feel it in his heart if he should have read this passage [in the above text]—and otherwise no one surely needs to know.)

(AV 23a/b)

What is this collusion of cognoscenti? What do they share that others like Werther, do not? An appreciation of an eighteenth-century, ironic point of view. And to what end? The way a tale is told and the way, subsequently, the author construes the voices and lives of his characters. Charlotte is no naive girl snuggled in the corner reading a book. She tells openly that hers is an experience involving an ironic and complex relationship among a text, reality, and our text at hand. She is in league with the playfully ironic editor-narrator. He is of her world.

Thus Charlotte's voice in Werther promulgates the ironically constructed world that the author creates about her as both she and he read, a world that is not Werther's. The process of her and our experience lies lodged in her own discourse on the novel: Goethe allows her to "find again her own Welt" through an author, "with whom events occur as they do about me" ("bey dem es zugeht wie um mich"). The communication between the two worlds is open and mutually cultivating.

Werther does not and cannot inhabit Charlotte's world, for no similarly imaginative, ironic experience applies to his voice, to this man of sensibility. Further clues to a harsh difference in perspective between Werther and the life and world of his beloved lie in editorial intrusions throughout the original novel and the new matter Goethe added in the revision of 1787. Two major examples of "reconstruction" come immediately to the reader's eye: the incorporation of the Bauernbursch (peasant lad) throughout the revised novel and the telltale reworking of the long editorial interruption.

The naive reading-public, in the main no different from today's, had misread Charlotte's discourse on the novel and, for that matter, the novel itself in its 1774 version. It should surprise no one, therefore, that Goethe might rewrite his original text to stress even more carefully the tale about Werther's alien and disintegrating world (Welt) and the striking opposition of the ironic world surrounding his Unwelt.

The Bauernbursch, an absolute antithesis to the peasant George of Drusenheim, just outside Goethe's German vicarage in Dichtung und Wahrheit, is that naive chap in love with an older, wealthy woman. He appears first in the new letter of Part I, May 30th in the revised text (AV 16b). He reappears in the revised Part II within the letter of September 4th as the sorry figure now deprived of love through the manipulations of his unscrupulous mistress and her covetous brother (AV 93-96b). Werther's voice in this new text undergoes a self-analysis that is central not only to any desire on Goethe's part to dissociate himself from the folly of his main character, but especially to reemphasize the isolation of Werther's voice and world. While professing an expected identification with the Bauernbursch, Werther, nevertheless, exposes the "difficult" social position of the woman involved: the brother's professed claims to her estate. All this once again lodges Werther in consternation, but, from the reader's point of view, a very revealing one:

Was ich dir erzahle, ist nicht ubertrieben, nichts verzartelt, ja ich darf wohl sagen, schwach schwach hab' ich's erzahlt and vergrabert hab ichs, indem ichs mit unsem hergebrachten sittlichen Worten vorgetragen habe.

(What I tell you is not exaggerated, in nothing overindulged. Yes, I might indeed venture to say, "Weakly, weakly have I narrated my tale an4 have made it coarse in so far as I have reported it with the language of our conventional morality.")

(AV 95b, emphasis mine)

We discover that the Bauernbursch murders the new lover of his ex-mistress in the revised "Editor to the Reader" (AV 119-21b). Most of the telling takes place in the context of a confrontation between, on the one hand, Lotte's father, the novel's Primrose, and Albert, by now in the novel Charlotte's husband, and, on the other, Werther. The father and Albert succeed in maintaining that all concerned must heed the law. In short, they maintain a moral and ethical world within and without the Bauernbursch that Werther cannot. And, in a quotation out of the mouth of Werther and set off from the rest of the text, the editor-narrator makes this clear:

"Du bist micht zu retten Unglucklicher! ich sehe wohl dass wir nicht zu retten sind."

("Unfortunate man, thou art not to be saved! I see clearly that we are not to be saved.")

(AV 121B)

The voices of the father, Albert, and the editor in the revision ultimately stress what in fictive reality must be the narrative context.

In the revised novel's second book, Goethe's additions or "narrative corrections" deal with the direct clarification in Werther's penned voice of his wretched isolation, his delusion as seen on the part of the narrator, the world of Charlotte and Albert, and the reader, and the now inherently alien and destructive presence of Nature (the new letters of Part II, February 8th, June 16th, September 4th, September 5th, October 27th, November 26th). Also added are a Catullan-charged, sexually obsessive description of Charlotte-Lesbia with her bird (Part II, September 12th); a pathetically rhetorical, but tellingly petrarchistic reduction of Werther's world to "a whole litany of antitheses" (Part II, November 22nd); and, most importantly, a rewritten and greatly extended intrusion by the editor-narrator.

The editorial intrusion of the original completes the novel and arises after all letters by date cease. The intrusion of the revision consists of both narrative comment and four dated or timed letters. Two of the dated letters, much crazed, appear outside the editor-narrator's purview in the original version (Part II, December 8th and December 17th, revised to December 12th and December 14th and hence more intense because of their temporal proximity). The first concerns Werther's suicidal bout with an equally encrazed Nature; the second, Werther's long-overdue realization of the suicidal lust he possesses for his beloved.

Why has the voice of an editorializing narrator co-opted these two letters? To prove that the editor's voice is really only Werther's (Blackall, 44-45) or to describe more strongly the distinction between a more conventional eighteenth-century Unwell and Werther's "unworldly" isolation? Goethe's revisions of his text in this matter and in others suggest strongly the second reason. The revised editor-narrator also accomplishes Goethe's goal by voicing actions on the part of Charlotte and Albert that differ subtly from those in the original text. In general, the husband and wife are drawn more decisively into the context of an even happier, more "vicarian" and conversational eighteenth-century world than Goethe had originally constructed for them. Both versions illuminate this world in which

… eine gute Freundinn … machte die Unterhaltung bey Tische ertraglich; man zwang sich, man redete, man erzahlte, man vergass sich.

(… a good woman friend … made the conversation at table bearable: one forced oneself [to cope], one spoke, one narrated stories, one forgot oneself.)

(AV 152a/b, emphasis mine)

The "new" editor-narrator, true to the now dangerously ironic separation or relationship of the characters' worlds, no longer voices Albert's antipathy (Widerwillen) and mistrust (Mistrauen) toward Werther (compare AV 116-117a and 116-117b), but only his "overt dislike of the act of suicide ("einen entschiedenen Widerwillen gegen die That"), "a strange circumstance" ("ein sonderbarer Umstand") that Goethe's revised text finds him "forced to add" (ISOb). There also appears in the narrative context a new set of voices in the form of "Albert's friends," who now offer a much more neutral interpretation of Charlotte's husband: "einen reinen, ruhigen Mann der nun eines langgewiinschten Gluckes teilhaftig geworden" ("a pure, quiet man, who had come to partake of a happiness for which he had long wished") (compare AV 117a and 117b). In the case of Charlotte, the "new" editor-narrator describes her in a decidedly more sympathetic light. Goethe adds two paragraphs in the editor-narrator's voice extolling the propriety of her character (AV 128-129b). No longer are we told directly of the internal struggle between her will and "the fire of Werther's embraces." Such a condition turns into merely a possibility and assumes the form of a question. The original text had extolled her pride in her own actions that caused her to reflect with antipathy (Widerwillen) upon the guilt (Schuld) of Werther and upon her hatred of him. Werther's Schuld is conspicuously absent in Goethe's revision (compare AV 149a and 149b). In short, both Albert and Charlotte react less to and, hence, become very much less a part of Werther's self-narrated world. In the novel's last pages, Albert's incapacity to follow the corpse and his wife's life-threatening crisis occur, not in a context of guilt, but of human sympathy for a man whose world they knew not at all.

Thus in Werther Goethe has elevated the irony of the eighteenth-century novel into an irony of fictive truth, a dangerous world of voices whose tales are at best only partially understood by the characters and narrators within the novel, but felt with a troubled sense of resignation by the reader. Always Goethe validates his irony with texts extrinsic to his own. Always they aid the reader in his quest for the "real."

The most powerful text behind Werther is The Vicar of Wakefield, and I have already referred to Macpherson's Ossian in terms of Werther's isolated and isolating narrative voice. Three others come to any careful reader's mind: Klopstock's "Die Fruhlingsfeier" of 1759, Lessing's Emilia Galloti of 1772, appearing only two years before the original version of Werther, and Homer's Odyssey of mythical date.

No text intrudes more impulsively into the text of Werther than Klopstock's "Die Frühlingsfeier." No other, including Ossian's, creates greater "narrative difficulties." Charlotte's impulsive grasping of Werther's hand and her voicing of the poet's name elicit an identical appeal to experience within the novel's text and assume a similar experience on the part of the reader. In Goethe's German novel, there was no reason to cite, let alone translate, the famous model text. But like Macpherson's, it is lyric, pregnant with sensibility, in short Wertheresque. Yet, the narrative context into which Goethe set it is more complex than might be assumed on first reading, for it also stresses the difference between Charlotte and Werther. Her view of the approaching storm and her memory of the poem devolve from an ironic sense of the fictively real. It is an appreciation of a lyric glimpse into a world best comprehended by reflective and reflected narrative. As Goethe adds to Werther's voice in his revision of the text:

[Ich] erinnerte mich sogleich der herrlichen Ode die ihr in Gedanken lag.…

[I] remembered immediately the magnificent ode which lay in her thoughts.…

(AV 28b, emphasis mine)

What Goethe expresses with these words is a very old, essentially rhetorical link among memory, recall, and art, one Charlotte might be said to entertain in Petrarch's echoing chamber of her mind, but one Werther recognizes only in terms of experience unmitigated by any sense of irony. His recognition shatters his world; her recognition creates hers. Thus again an extratextual allusion becomes a hazardous irony.

Similarly the intrusion of the then contemporary text of Emilia Galotti tells us more of narrated worlds than of itself. Although the eighteenth-century viewer probably saw the play as reflecting an insight into life, just as Charlotte and Goethe had accepted Goldsmith's Vicar, neither Werther nor we can read Lessing's work in that way through the context of Werther, where it symbolizes a man's last expression of his world. The text supplies the reader with no comforting, knowable Unwelt, and it is for this reason, very probably, that its place in the novel has always been so highly problematic.

But who specifically has read the play in the novel? Werther, and Werther, to be blunt, cannot read right. In this Goethe has drawn the line between his main character and himself with a harsh and definitive stroke.

Werther's defect is part and parcel of his growing inability to create in any sphere of art, that is of ironic self-reflection, whatsoever. In the addition of the Bauernbursch in book one, Goethe reemphasizes exactly the choice of stunning experience over painting (Mahlerei) and poetry (Dichtkunst) in the revised text (AV 16b). As far as stories go, not only is Werther unable to narrate one in writing (Part I, June 16: "Ich bin vergniigt und glucklich, und so kein guter Historienschreiber," "I am delightfully diverted and happy, and therefore no good writer of story [or history]"—AV 18a/b), he is incapable of reading seriously one of the world's oldest tales: Homer's Odyssey. The reader first comes upon him as he skips through it in a self-indulgent, cavalier way with a cup of coffee at hand (AV Part I, May 26th a/b). Goethe himself, on the other hand, viewed Homer's text much more complexly from even as early as 1771 when he linked Sophocles to the Bard (WA Zum Schakespears Tag 1.37.131, see 1.38.286). For him that epic would never have recalled merely a flaccid, pastoral genre. Moreover, unlike Werther, he would have understood the doubly dangerous irony inherent in the action of Penelope's suitors as they carved up her husband Odysseus' kine (AV Part I, June 21st a/b). How could Werther's thoughts not link Penelope to Charlotte and Albert to Odysseus? Because he was incapable of creating himself through reflected ironies. Goethe's and Charlotte's ability to read involves just this kind of irony and went on to create the appealing Unwelt in Werther. Werther has no ironic claim because reading has lost its human complexities. It provides him no Unwelt, no irony of the fictively real.

Goethe's sense of irony in the telling and experience of a story about and around his characters' voices, therefore, extends beyond merely establishing a trustworthy narrator with a steady perspective.'" His juxtaposition of imploding and cultivating worlds creates narrative conflicts within the novel that continually cry in vain for resolution. The voicing of immediate experience, no matter how well defined by a strong voice from a wider context, must always cause conflicting sympathies on the part of a reader. But, although it might be tempting to isolate such voices antithetically either in the realm of narrative sense or in that of lyric sensibility, it is more fruitful to speak of the textual interaction between the two that forms the structure and parameters of Goethe's first novel.

"Klopstock!," "Emilia Galotti," "Homer," and Goethe's and Werther's translation "einiger Gesange Ossians" ("of several Ossianic songs") (AV 136a/b) are positively employed models in that they skew Goethe's ironic view of the world to fruitful ends. Such extratextual intrusions would continue to jell in the novels that were to follow. Yet, his own ironic sense of narration would not have arisen were it not for Goldsmith's ironic The Vicar of Wakefield. In a letter to Zelter in 1829, Goethe wrote of his then present identification with the Vicar Primrose and acknowledged fully his debt to eighteenth-century irony: "It would be impossible to reckon," he wrote, "what Goldsmith and Steme have directly contributed to the chief characteristics of my development" (WA Briefe IV.46.193-94). This essay has made only preliminary attempts at a guess.

As for the reader of Goethe's Werther, the author's jest in answer to Christoph Friedrich Nicolai's contemporary satire Die Freuden des jungen Werthers might well be heeded:

Und wer mich nicht verstehen kann,
Der lerne besser lesen.

Loosely translated:
If you're too dumb to get my gist
Learn to read with better wit.
(WA "Auf Nicolai" D & W 13 1.28.231)"¹¹

Notes

¹ Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 45. After initial citation, any further reference to a work will be indicated in abbreviated form within parentheses in my text.

² Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, ed. by commission of Grandduchess Sophie von Sachsen, 133 vols. (Weimar: Bohlau, 1887-1919). Cited as WA.

³ All translations from the German are my own.

⁴ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, ed. Ema Merker, I. Text Erste und Zweite Fassung (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1954). Cited as AV. Goethe's Werther appeared in an original version in 1774 and in a revised one in 1787. Setting aside some "cleansing" revision of orthography, punctuation, and dialectical pungency, the difference between the two lies in shorter altered or intensified descriptions of the major characters' behavior and in longer major additions that ultimately attain the same end. For those parts of the text that have only been "cleansed" in the revision, I shall quote the revised version, but indicate the similarity between the two by "a/b"; texts only in the original, by "a"; and those only in the revision by "b." To Eric A. Blackall Goethe and the Novel (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1976), 44-55, must be given the credit for first comparing the two versions extensively in narrative terms.

⁵ See Lilian R. Furst's "The Metamorphosis of Irony," in Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984), 23-48.

⁶ D.W. Jefferson, "The Vicar of Wakefield and Other Prose Writings: A Reconsideration," in The Art of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Andrew Swarbrick (London: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 30.

⁷ James Macpherson ("Translator"), The Poems of Ossian, 2 vols. (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1784), I.207.

⁸ See chapter eleven of Goldsmith's An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning.

⁹ Lilian R. Furst, "The Man of Sensibility and the Woman of Sense," Jahrbuch fur Internationale Germanistik 14:1 (1983), 13-36.

¹⁰ Victor Lange, "Goethe's Craft of Fiction," Publications of the English Goethe Society N.S. 22 (1952-1953), 31-63; on this point, see 40.

¹¹ I should like to thank Albrecht Strauss for his suggestions at the final stages of this essay.